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There are many things that stop us from making the changes that we need to make in our lives, in this case quitting drinking alcohol. Fear is certainly up there with the best of them… As is procrastination. Here are eight things preventing you from quitting drinking alcohol and what you can do about them.

8 Things Preventing You from Quitting Drinking Alcohol & What To Do

Transcript

Today I wanted to talk about eight things that might be stopping you from drinking alcohol and what you can do about them.

One

The main thing is excuses. You make excuses for every part of this – this is the reason why I can’t stop, this is the reason why I like to drink, the reason why I can’t do this is – X. Fit your excuse into there.

There is not any room for excuses in this, the only person you’ve got to blame for any of this is you, yourself.

There is nothing else stopping you from doing it. The only thing that you have to do in this is to not put the alcohol into your body and any reasons that you have for quitting drinking alcohol, any reasons you have to continuing to drink alcohol, can all be countermanded by much more sensible and much more practical reasons to quit drinking.

There is no excuse for doing it, the only way you are going to stop doing this is to stop doing it all together, to not put the alcohol into your mouth in the first place.

Two

There is nothing else stopping you from quitting drinking alcohol except you.

You are the person who puts the alcohol in, you are the person who has put the alcohol in, time after time after time, drink after drink after drink, mouthful after mouthful and you are the only person that can stop that flow.

So, sit down and say to yourself “I am the only person who can not stop myself from drinking; I am the only person you can stop myself from drinking”

Three

You let your brain and thoughts get the better of you, you let yourself talk yourself out of these things.

It is your brain, your thoughts and it is up to you to direct your thoughts and don’t say that you can’t direct your thoughts, because you can. You are directing your thoughts every day.

The reason why most people don’t quit drinking when they want to quit drinking is because they are taking their thoughts and directing their thoughts in the direction they want them to go, they don’t really want to quit drinking because they haven’t figured out that it’s the alcohol that’s killing them and they haven’t figured out something better to do in their life.

They are afraid of whatever is in their future, they don’t want to head that way so they make excuses, they conjure up reasons in their head why they can’t do it and all these thoughts about why you can’t do this and why you can’t do that is all conjured up inside your mind and your thoughts.

Four

Lack of confidence in yourself or in your goals. So, you don’t really believe in yourself, you don’t believe that can do it. You don’t believe in your goals, you don’t believe that your goals are worthwhile or that you are capable of getting to those goals – another self confidence thing.

It takes a lot of work that kind of stuff, but it’s only a skill thing, but it’s a skill thing that you need to learn, you can learn and that you should learn.

Most of this is down to a skill deficit, it’s a skill that you don’t have, it’s a skill that you need to progress; but you don’t have it right now so you think “I can’t do it because I don’t have the skill” but all skills are learnable, you start to learn a skill by learning the skill.

Five

No focus. You have no focus that is dragging you forwards and that’s one of the biggest things that you can have.

You have the reason why you want to do this and your reason can be to get away from something or if can be to get to something.

People are twice as likely to avoid pain and to do something to avoid pain because they are wired to get pleasure in their lives, so have your big reason why you want to stop and keep that foremost in your mind, but you need something in your life that is going to be dragging you forwards as well.

Six

Another reason why people don’t stop drinking alcohol is because they don’t know what they are doing.

They don’t feel like they know what they are doing, but most of us are in that position in the beginning, most of us do not know what we are doing.

When I first quit drinking I had an idea of where I wanted to go, I had an idea of the person I wanted to be and this is who I want to be.

I don’t want to be a bad father; I don’t want to be a person who fails in their business; I don’t want to be a person who weighs 260 pounds; I don’t want to be a person who is shoving food into their mouths day in day out; I don’t want to be a person who is unhappy.

I want to be a person who is healthy; I want to be a good father; I want to have a decent weight; I want to be fit; I want to have money in the bank; I want to be successful in my business.

These things were all the things that I used to get me going, but I didn’t know what any of those things meant. I had a good idea what they meant. Inside my mind I had some sort rudimentary vision about what my life was going to look like.

Four years later some of the stuff is realistic, some of the stuff is happening, other stuff isn’t happening, other stuff is completely different to what I imagined it would be and I haven’t actually achieved all the goals that I wanted to achieve, but it is an ongoing process.

It is a dynamic process, but you have to start out, you don’t necessarily have to know what you are doing you just have to take a step in the right direction.

Seven

People don’t know where to start, they figure out that there is this magical place somewhere and that they are going to wait until they get to a certain point.

Maybe you are going to wait until 1 January, which is what I did, but I was close to it when I was considering quitting drinking. I was musing about giving up drinking in the October and November of the year before and it wasn’t until my Son came over during the Christmas holidays, and I’ve talked about this before, but once he’d gone back I realised certain things about myself and my Son and our relationship and how that was going to go forwards or how I feared that was going to go forwards, that I made the decision to stop.

So it was very close to 1 January, I didn’t actually quit until 2 January, but what I am saying is there is no right time to stop drinking alcohol. You just have to take a step and say, “Is it worth my while drinking for another two weeks? What am I going to get out of it? What am I going to get out of drinking for another month?”

Leaving it for two months or waiting for something different to happen, means all that alcohol between now and then is still going to be going into my system, all that time that I could have been pursuing something else I am going to be wasting doing this, so is it worth my while waiting?

Why not just take the step now and put up with the discomfort, the fear and whatever else is going to happen. Decide I am going to take the step even though I don’t really know what’s happening, but I’m going to take this step now.

And that’s where to start – now.

Eight

Another reason why people don’t make a start is because they don’t feel that they have the support that is necessary.

The only support you need is yourself you are the only person who can do this.

If you’ve got support outside yourself then all well and good, but if you don’t have it what is the point of not doing it?

By quitting drinking you can put yourself into a position where you are exploring new areas of your life, you are no longer relying on a chemical to alter your brain patterns, no longer relying on a chemical to dampen down your life, you are out there and you are experiencing life and you find support doing that.

You find people that are in the same boat as you who are challenged, doing the same thing; or you find people that want to do the same things that you want to do, to get to that same position that you want to reach.

I’m find that more in my life now. I’ve now got a mentor and he is the Guy that taught me when when I started out on the internet about twelve years go. I recently found this Guy’s details by chance, so I called him on the off chance and now I am getting half an hour weekly call with him.

I’m having to pay for it, but nothing in life is free, but it is moving me forwards more than anything else, with my business and the way I am thinking about things.

My mentor has been in this type of business, online business, a long time and so it was just another one of those things that I talked about in another video about chance opportunities, just that sometimes something comes into your path that you’ve got to grasp and take hold of it and I wouldn’t have found that if I hadn’t have stopped drinking.

It was funny because the first website that I had, that this Guy helped me with was about ‘brewing your first beer at home’. That was the first ever website that I had and I had forgotten all about that.

Isn’t that just a totally ironic, sort of a weird, fucked up sort of thing? That my first journey into creating a journey was on beer and that the most successful thing that I’ve ever done is doing alcohol mastery and teaching people how to avoid beer and how to look at beer.

Nine (additional tip!)

One of the things why people don’t move forwards in their life is that they fear they are going to succeed.

I know what might sound counter intuitive, but it’s’ true. A lot of times people think that if I really get to the stage where I am one year down the road and I’ve actually built something in my life that proceeds my drinking, I can’t drink anymore because of it.

If I drink again I’m going to lose everything that I’ve built up for myself, then I really can not drink any more and that is success that some people fear.

It’s the same kind of fear that people have when they think about never drinking alcohol again.

That one year mark is a big milestone. I’m not a big fan of counting days but it is a big milestone, it’s one of those things that just makes you feel like you’ve achieved something great and it’s not just a milestone, it’s the fact that you’ve done so much, you remember so much of that year.

You know you’ve gone away on vacation, you’ve built things, you’ve built relationships, you’ve whatever you had done in your life, but it is a constructive year and it is a milestone to celebrate that level of construction in your life – that level of self engineering.

If you like that you’ve done this yourself, you haven’t hidden away from life any more you haven’t used any substances to try and short cut life with any more. You’ve taken life by the scruff of it’s fucking neck and you have dragged life with you and achieved something.

You know once you’ve got to that level, that success, you can think about alcohol and think about it in the sense of “I am never drinking again”

That is what I thought about all those years of drinking alcohol – why did I think alcohol was ever going to give me anything? It’s given me nothing. It’s taken away from my life and I have no compunction now about saying- I will never ever drink again.

All the things that I’ve talked about and this by no means is the end of the list, there are hundreds of reasons why people won’t quit drinking alcohol, this is just eight/nine of them.

Some of them are caused by a skilled deficit because you haven’t got the skills necessary; but you don’t need the skills to do this, you just don’t put the alcohol in your mouth in the first place.

Some of them are to do with fear of the unknown, fear of success, fear that you are going to make an idiot of yourself, fear about what are people are going to say to you. All of these things are bullshit and you can get over that once you take the fear on board and move yourself regardless of what’s happening, because at the end of the day the fear is in here, it’s not out there and if you can deal with whatever’s out there you can deal with success.

Like I said you get success and that’s the best thing to stop fear altogether. The action of just moving forward will stop the fear, dealing with people is never as difficult as you might think it is, finding your friends and rejigging your old friendship all that kind of stuff, is a lot easier than you think it’s’ going to be.

A lot of reasons why people don’t quit is just more procrastination. It’s just purely down to people saying “Well I’ll do it tomorrow, I can’t be arsed to do it today, I just want to drink tonight and I want to enjoy myself now so I will do it tomorrow” and that type of procrastination is just always going to defeat you because procrastination defeats you in the moment.

Procrastination is not something that you get tomorrow and you can have the same procrastination and you can put it off until tomorrow and tomorrow never comes. You never do these things, so think about all of the things that I said throughout those eight/nine points and just try to work through them.

If you have something that you need to learn – then go out and learn it, learn it bit by bit, by bit, by bit.

If you don’t know something about something ask! That’s what I keep saying to people. If you want to have a video done by me, just ask a question, just leave ask a question, leave a question in the comments below about what you are stuck with and I will make a video of it or point you to a video I have already done – but the point is to ask

If you don’t ask I can’t do this. If you don’t want to ask me then ask someone else who knows what they are talking about, don’t ask another drinker about how to stop drinking because they are not going to tell you anything. They are still drinking, they are still on a drug.

If you want to come over to the website we’ve got so much information there now, we’ve got over 600 hundred videos, it’s just a great resource that’s been built up over these last four years. A lot of these videos are from the beginning which show my mentality when I stopped and fears that I had. I might not be voicing those fears but you can see them, you can see it in my face when I am saying it and how I am doing things and you can see the growth of me as a person over the four years. You can see what a life without alcohol is like and how you can progress.

My life was going downwards before I stopped drinking alcohol and now it’s going upwards.

So, go over there, have a look at the videos, we have a load of courses as well over there. I am charging for the courses, but this is how I make my living now, so there are three different courses at the moment and there are going to be a couple more added this year and they are basically everything that I’m saying within those 600 videos but they are condensed down into a step by step thing.

So if you want to save yourself a lot of time, take one of the courses.

I’ve got a course on the ‘stop drinking alcohol’ which is basically around the whole philosophy of what I’m talking about, a lot of stuff about just rethinking drinking in our lives and the culture and all this kind of stuff.

I’ve got one on ‘preparation’ how to get yourself from thinking about quitting drinking alcohol, to actually quitting and building yourself up, giving you that whole gee up to do it.

And then I’ve got the ‘thirty day reboot’ which has a little bit at the beginning – it has a before unit, during unit and after unit – and it basically tells you a little bit about preparing yourself to stop drinking but the most important bit is going through the first three days and how to get through those days and then what to do afterwards. Whether you are going to go back on the alcohol, what are you are going to decide? And that is a very small part of it and I don’t encourage you start drinking again, a lot of this one is about going forwards and building on your momentum and building on your success of what was done in the last thirty days.

“Only put off until tomorrow, what you are willing to die having left undone” – Pablo Picasso

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